Oct 18 2014

The Writer’s Blog Tour

A big thank you to the lovely Lisa Fuqua, who invited me to take part in this Blog Tour, you can read Lisa’s post here.

So here is my contribution to the tour, I will be nominating two writers to continue the thread at the end!

What am I currently working on?

My work in progress is the latest novel in the Earth Angel series, which I have called The Twin Flame Reunion. It is not a sequel as such, but a missing piece from The Earth Angel Awakening. It follows the reunions of five Twin Flame couples, as they Awaken, reunite, and go through the struggles that so many Twin Flames are going through at the moment. As usual, I had no idea what I was going to write, or what was going to happen, and as the words flow through me, I am amazed at how the characters and events are coming together, and how much they are mirroring my own experiences at this very moment. I can’t wait to see where the story goes, and in turn, what effect that has on my life, as quite often, what I write in my books comes true in real life…

How does my work differ from others in my genre?

My genre, that of Spiritual or Visionary Fiction, is a fairly undeveloped genre at the moment, though it is growing daily. I think that my books are a little different because I am not creating the stories – I am mostly channelling them. The stories come through me, not from me. Though my own experiences come into them, the overall plot and the characters come to me when I sit down to write. It feels more like I am describing a memory or writing what I can see in another dimension than actually making it up. And that can be a scary process, because I really just have to trust that the next part of the story will arrive, and that it will all make sense, and will be interesting and readable. My last book, I’m Here, was co-written with a spirit, and that was tough for me, because though it was easy to channel his words, I had to really push myself to write my side of the story, which was really hard work!

Why do I write what I do?

I don’t think I could write anything else, because when I sit down to write, the words come through and it’s not always in my control. I think my books contain messages and stories that people need to read or hear. And they are also my way of dealing with being in the world. From the feedback I’ve had so far, they have helped many people to figure out who they are, and what their purpose on Earth is. Which is why I keep writing. Because who knows how many people the next book will help?

How does my writing process work?

I have a netbook that I write my novels on, and I use Scrivener to write them in, because I love the folder system, the corkboards and the automatic backup, which has saved my sanity and soul many times. I usually sit on my bed, or in a cafe or even in parks to write, and I like to set crazy deadlines, Nanowrimo-style, to get me motivated to finish them in time. I sometimes have a scene or a concept in my mind, but mostly, I just put my fingers to the keyboard and see what comes through. If I think too much, then I get in the way of the words, and I stop flow, and if that happens, the best thing I can do is to close the computer down, walk away from it and do something completely different. I like to have music playing that sets the right tone for what I am writing. Sometime I will get stuck on a single song, and I will play it on repeat so it becomes almost like white noise, blocking the rest of the world out.

So that’s me! I nominate the following two fabulous writers to continue the Writer’s Blog Tour, and invite them to tell us about their writing.

Rebecca Pillsbury

Though one of her childhood fantasies was to have superhuman powers that allowed her to travel instantaneously around the globe—or at the very least, fly—it is Rebecca’s distinctly human persona that causes strangers and dogs alike to want to be her new best friend. With a commitment to spreading joy and inspiring others to let go of shame and let shine their light, Rebecca unabashedly reveals her own vulnerability so that others may feel safe exploring their own.

Even as a young child growing up in Wisconsin, Rebecca found solace in writing stories, drawing inspiration from faraway places. Her wanderlust was fed as a young adult via worldwide pen-pal relationships, which gave way to her own international travels in her adult life. It was during her travels that she was exposed to new spiritual guides, paving the path for her journey-inspired transformational writing. Rather than simply leading readers to travel vicariously through her stories, however, she inspires readers to write their own stories.

Rebecca currently resides in Portland, Oregon, though you may not find her there year-round—a vagabond spirit cannot be tamed. You could look for her frolicking in forests or careening on rocks by the sea, but you’ll have better luck following her via her blog or on Facebook.

Lori Lesko

Lori Lesko was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She began dancing when she was five and acting at 13. She studied photography for a year at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. She graduated college with a degree in Psychology and Theater. She directed, acted, choreographed and stage managed several plays while attending school.

She loves to travel and has been to France and Ireland. She adapted her first book, a Novella called Our Daughters, into a Screenplay now titled Diamond City. She lives in Florida with her two dogs. She has worked as an editor for ten years at a financial publishing company.

She has just published her first novel titled COPYRIGHT a psychological thriller.

Mar 31 2014

Scapple, the Chronodex and a Breakthrough

It has been a very interesting 10 days indeed! Just wanted to write a little update on a couple of developments that have occurred, that have had quite an impact on me and my life. On the weekend of the 22nd March, I happened to come across a nifty bit of software called Scapple. It was created by the same folks as Scrivener, which as you know is my favourite piece of writing software ever.

Scapple is a mind-mapping tool. No, scrap that. It is THE mind-mapping tool. When trying to organise my thoughts and ideas, I often mind-map on paper. But things are always in the wrong place and other things get deleted and it looks like a mess in the end. Enter Scapple. On Saturday, I was actually attempting to mind-map on paper, and was getting quite frustrated. When I discovered, and then bought and downloaded Scapple, I was totally hooked, and got the mind-map done speedily and efficiently (and it looks way better than my scribbles!) It’s also given me a new way to do my talks and workshops, as I can use them as prompts instead of using notes or a script, which I don’t like to do. If you are even vaguely curious, I would urge you to download the trial version and have a go!

On the same day, through the blog of a lady called Julie who followed my blog, I found the Chronodex. For years, I have bought diaries, used them for a few days into the year, only to lose them until October. Planning my time and recording my time, has been something that I have not been able to do easily, but something that I wanted to be able to do. Well, for the last ten days, I have been using the Chronodex daily, and it is completely changing the way I look at my days, and is enabling me to schedule my time and to see when things are taking up too much time. The Chronodex was created by a guy called Patrick Ng, and he is happy for people to download the Chronodex diaries he posts on his blog, all they cost is a prayer for the good health of his family. I just copied the image from Julie’s blog and printed, cut and paste them into a notebook, so that I could record other things on the page too. But I made sure I sent a prayer to his family too.

The Chronodex in action!

On Thursday last week, I had a visit from the fabulous George Hardwick, and his wife and baby girl. He had come to see me so that we could have a session together, working out what I should focus on, where I should go next. For the next few hours, we went through what I had already created, what I needed to do to make that more successful, and also what I really enjoyed doing. To have someone like George speak so passionately and get so excited about my work, made me really look at what I have created in a new light. It’s been a while since I really stepped back and looked at what I have achieved in the last few years, and actually, it’s quite a lot! I sometimes get so wrapped up in worrying about all the things I still need to do, that I forget to celebrate and appreciate what I have already done. After our session, I was talking to my partner about some of the ideas, and a little later, the vision of what I should be doing and how it should work, came into my mind, and I suddenly understood what George had meant when he said that at the moment of breakthrough, you will have tears of joy in your eyes. To have it all make so much sense, and to feel so right, was just amazing. I bounced around for the rest of the evening, and though the last three days have been crazy, that feeling hasn’t gone away. I know what to do now. I know what my next step is, and I know it will all work out perfectly.

So if you find yourself stuck, if you cannot see the next step, and if you want to make a living giving your gift and being the creative soul you truly are, than please get in touch with George!

Jan 21 2014

Lost in a Technical Blip

Am just dealing with the fact that in transferring photos from my phone to my computer, about four months worth (the last four months) have vanished. They are no longer on my phone and they are not on my computer. Somewhere along the way, there must have been an error and they are now irretrievable. Luckily, a few I had uploaded to facebook, but the rest, well, they’re just gone. Of course after talking to the helpful people at Samsung, I realise that I should have done a back up and transfer via Kies Air, rather than the old school transferring method. But it’s too late for that now.

As upsetting as it is, to lose the photos, (even though I cannot remember all of what I have taken in the last few months) it started me thinking about how reliant I am on my computer and my phone. Of which either could easily malfunction or be lost or stolen. You could say – save it all to the cloud, it’ll be safe there. But is it? Have you ever considered what you would do or how you would feel if Facebook of WordPress suddenly deleted your account? Or they had a massive blip and all the photos, conversations and posts were lost?

I would imagine that it would be similar to the loss of having all of your photographs destroyed in a fire or flood in your home. They’re damaged beyond repair, and there is nothing you can do except to accept they are gone, and to move on. In some ways, it is a kind of cleansing, a de-cluttering. How often do you look at your old photos? How often to you re-read old letters or diaries or old blog posts? Is it even healthy to hold onto all of these old memories? I used to create scrapbooks from my photos, and in more recent times, photobooks, and it’s fun to occasionally look back and remember good memories. But would my life be terrible if that was not possible? Would the world come to an end if I couldn’t look at my holiday photos from ten years ago? I doubt it. We are apparently exposed to more information in a single hour, than people in 1900 were exposed to in a single year. So it is probably actually impossible to keep up with the flow of information coming to you and also revisit previous information and remain a sane human being.

Though the photos may be irreplaceable, and I cannot re-create them, when lost, surely it is a better idea to just become focused on creating new memories? On having new experiences? That’s where my focus is right now. I have decided that mourning the loss of some digital files is not a good use of my time today. Instead I intend to learn my lesson about backing up, and plan for new and exciting events and experiences this year. And even, I may take less photos. Why? Because sometimes, in this new digital world, we spend more time capturing our lives on digital film than we do actually experiencing the moment. Have you noticed this? You go to a party, and instead of communicating properly with one another, the guests are taking photos of each other, then immediately uploading them to twitter and facebook, with captions about how great a time they’re having, then they spend the rest of the party on those social media platforms, responding to comments about the photo. They’re not actually present in the moment. They’re not fully at the party. I know I am guilty of this, I think anyone with a smartphone is probably guilty of having done this. So perhaps this is the year of spending more real-time with people, and less digital time. We’ll see if I manage to do that.

On another backing up note – if you are a writer, like myself. then you know how important it is to back up your works-in -progress. Last year, while writing The Other Side, my netbook crashed and shut down, and when I re-opened my file, 2000 words of my novel were missing. Not just the scenes I had just written, but some earlier scenes too. Because of the way I write (no plan or plot) I had absolutely no idea what I had lost exactly. There’s no way I could have re-written the scenes. After a minute of absolute panic (and screaming swear words, good thing I live in the middle of the woods), I vaguely remembered that when I downloaded Scrivener, there was some kind of automatic backup system. Using their help feature, I managed to find out where the auto-backups were stored, and there they were – all my lost words. So if you are a writer, and you sometimes get lazy about backing up your work – we all do at times – use Scrivener. It saved me then, and I have no doubt it will probably save me again in the future.

I hope you are having a better day than I have had so far, and now that I have made peace with losing my files, it’s time to get on with some work. Which of course, I will back up 😉